How you tell Mack what to do
Mack is the same on every phone, but how Mack responds is up to you. Each child has their own mode setting in your Orbit app:
- Off. Mack still reads every child-to-child message in and out, and crisis flags still fire, but nothing else triggers any action. Use this when you want the safety net for crisis only and trust your child to handle the rest.
- Hold for approval. A flagged message is paused on the phone: on the way out, before it's sent; on the way in, before it's shown to your child. You get a push notification and can approve or reject it from your Orbit app. Pending requests expire after 24 hours.
- Block. Mack stops flagged messages on the phone. Outgoing messages are stopped before they're sent. Your child sees a clear, friendly explanation and the message never goes. Incoming messages are stopped before your child sees them, with an alert to you so you know it happened.
Within whichever mode you choose, you can also tell Mack to ignore individual categories. If your child plays games where "free Robux" is just gaming chatter, switch the scams category off without affecting the rest. If hate speech and bullying are the only ones that matter to you right now, leave only those on.
The crisis categories (self-harm, suicidal thoughts) can't be turned off. Whatever the mode, whatever the other categories you've turned off, Mack will always show the crisis card to the child and send an alert to you.
When a child has two parents, Mack's settings belong to the child, not to either parent. There's one set of toggles per child, and any adult linked to that child can change them. Everyone linked sees the same settings and updates the same settings, so you're working from a single source of truth.
The crisis safety net
When Mack flags a crisis category, three things happen at the same time on the phone:
- The child sees a crisis card with UK helplines, Childline 0800 1111 and Samaritans 116 123, right there in the conversation, before they put the phone down.
- You receive an urgent alert telling you the category that fired and the time, with the message itself sealed inside so only your phone can open it. Our servers never see the words.
- The message is still sent to the person on the other end. Orbit does not silence a child reaching out for help. That's a deliberate choice, not a gap.
The crisis path is the one place where Mack's behaviour is fixed and non-negotiable, because the cost of getting it wrong in the other direction is too high. We'd rather flag too often and have a quiet, awkward conversation with your child than miss a moment that mattered.
Watchlist: your custom signals
Mack covers the general categories. The Watchlist is your family's own layer on top: words or phrases you add: a friend's name, an app you're worried about, "vape", "Snapchat", a slang term you've heard in passing. When a watchlist word appears in a message your child sends or receives, you get a notification.
The Watchlist is notification-only. It never stops a message. It never holds a message. It's a heads-up for conversations you might want to have. Like Mack, the watchlist check happens on the phone. The words you've chosen to watch never leave your phone or your child's phone.